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Charles A. Van Bibber’s Vietnam War memoir, Valentine’s Day: A Marine Looks Back (The Covington Group, 402 pp. $16.95, paper), uses his remembrances, the recollections of his fellow Marines, and official records to present his 13-month tour of duty chronologically. Van Bibber and his fellow members of the 2nd Battalion, 27th Marines left Camp Pendleton, California, on February 14, 1968. “At Da Nang, our C-141 landed near a hot LZ. At the time the airfield was being rocketed and mortared,” he writes. “We are in combat. This was real! Welcome to Vietnam.”

Van Bibber was impressed that unlike other units, the members of Fox Company used family names rather than nicknames. He was “Van,” he writes in this pleasantly readable book. In addition to the NVA and Viet Cong, his enemies included red dust, idleness, daytime flies, and nighttime mosquitoes.

In late February Van Bibber wrote to his family about how difficult life was for the South Vietnamese villagers and their children and how he offered them food and felt sorry for them. In March his newbie status suddenly changed after one of the men in his company was killed. Then the loss of three squad members changed the tone of his letters

Van Bibber, promoted to Lance Corporal, took over as a Squad Leader after the former Squad Leader was killed in action. At that time, death “became a part of life,” he writes. In September, he wrote home to his family members, telling them, “things had changed. I knew that my chances of being wounded or killed were pretty high.”

In Vietnam

Near the end of his tour, he writes: “It was a funny thing, but I was still in knots waiting for the one with my name on it. Hey, I’m short, in fact, I’m next, so give me a break.”

Charles A.Van Bibber got that break on March 6, 1969, when he caught his Freedom Bird home.